My mother, like many white South African women, rarely speaks of politics, hardly reads the newspaper, or only the kind with headlines like “Monkey Steals Baby from Carriage,” but anything about the English royal family, on the contrary, has an almost sacred glow. She reveres the Queen, who has been so brave, she says, during the war, the Queen who will become the Queen Mother in 1952.
We were even taken to see the royal family, including the two princesses, in 1947, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, when they came out to South Africa for a visit. I remember the crush of the crowds and a terrible moment, when my sister let go of my hand, and I was lost for a few moments of panic.
I still have a photograph of Maxine in her presentation dress on my bedroom wall, and sometimes people ask me if it is a photo of me, which makes my heart tilt with sorrow. There is something so unworldly about her with the cloud of light behind her head, a misty English countryside suggested in the background. She sits there in her ethereal loveliness in her pale mauve dress with the pleats, a curl on her forehead, her shy smile. Why did I not sense she would escape us all? Why did I not see how soon this would be, and how tragic?
I remember how my sister told me Prince Phillip, poor man, looked very bored at this endless procession of young girls, peered down the front of her décolleté to get a glimpse of her smooth breasts.
After the presentation she was asked out by this young Englishman who invited her to his flat. At his door she made the embarrassing error in etiquette of shaking hands with his batman, a sort of superior servant of an officer, she tells me.
She has told all these suitors she will make up her mind soon. Now she has met someone new, which adds to her confusion. She often has difficulty making up her mind.
Maxine in her presentation dress.
“Mummy’s against it,” my sister says, smiling ruefully. She holds my little girl so lovingly against her shoulder, her hand on her head. My sister loves babies.
“Why? A handsome doctor, and you always said you wanted to be a doctor yourself,” I say.
“Well, the Afrikaans background, though he speaks perfect English—and you know what she thinks of them, going around saying they beat the natives with a sjambok and commit incest on their deserted farms.”
Mother maintains her grandfather was a Russian nobleman, whose land was usurped by a wicked uncle. He had to leave his vast estate, his serfs, the forests of white birch, and flee his country. He wandered through many lands, learning the twelve languages, not including the native ones, which he supposedly spoke. Passing through Salonika, he adopted the name of the place and came out to South Africa. I will later discover he started a grocery store there, though Mother leaves this less-glamorous part out of her story.
Was he perhaps a Greek? I wonder, later in my life, seeing the picture of the dark-haired merchant, standing outside his store, his apron tied around his waist, surrounded by his large family. Wherever her family came from, Mother looks down on the Afrikaners, the Boers. She considers them uncouth and, though she herself has never finished high school, uneducated. She makes fun of their simple guttural language and cites their translations from the Bible with derision. She maintains the Afrikaans translation of “Gird up your loins” is “Maak vas jou broek,” which makes her laugh because of the sound of the simple words. Since the bitter Anglo-Boer War at the start of the twentieth century, there has remained great enmity between the two white tribes.
My sister says the family is quite poor. Carl is the only one who seems to have succeeded so brilliantly, thanks to a good brain, a capacity to focus on the task at hand, and hard work. There are innumerable brothers and sisters, and a niece will later tell me his mother, Azalea, would run after them and beat them all hard with a hairbrush.
“The mother is rather plump and wears terrible hats. You know what a snob Mummy can be,” Maxine says.
“Do you love him?” I ask.
“I like how frank he is with me, that he tells me the truth, says what he thinks. It’s refreshing,” she says.
“I know what you mean,” I say, smiling at her, thinking of how we have both scoffed at all those “nice” boys our mother has introduced us to, all seemingly called Cecil or Montague. We don’t give much weight to Mother’s opinion on the subject of marriagable men, or indeed on anything else. On the contrary, we are open to others, ready to take a chance. We both know that Mother, who has not had the privileged childhood we have had, nor the education, feels it is important to marry someone wealthy and live in a large house with many servants as she has been able to do.
When I tell Mother I would like to be independent, to find meaningful work, she stares at me blankly and says with genuine surprise, “What on earth would you want to work for, dear?” Much of her life has been a successful struggle to avoid any work.
V
TOKOLOSH
MOTHER LIVES THE LAZY LIFE OF THE PRIVILEGED WHITE woman in apartheid South Africa. She spends her mornings sipping tea, dressing up. She sallies forth in her flowered hat, gloves, and high heels to visit friends or to shop in Rose-bank, a suburb of Johannesburg. She spends our father’s hard-earned money. He, twenty years older than her, does not seem to mind, though from time to time he says, “Money does not grow on trees,” and appears briefly in the evenings, going through the garden turning off taps.
Mother buys innumerable pastel dresses, leghorn hats with flowers, and pale kid gloves with buttons up to the elbow for herself, for her two sisters, her friends. She buys shoes; she has many pairs of small, delicate, expensive European shoes.
She and her sisters are proud of their small hands and feet, their soft dark curls, their hazel eyes. Appearances are most important; they are what has enabled her to advance: the clothes, the figure, the face. “Clothes maketh the man,” she says. Sometimes, unexpectedly, though she cannot spell, she quotes Shakespeare.
She has the nanny dress us up in smocked dresses, organdy sunsuits with little sleeves like wings, white socks, and shoes.
Above all, Mother sleeps. She grasps sleep greedily in her clenched fists, as though it were the most precious thing in the world. She sleeps all through the long hot afternoons in the green light of her high-ceilinged room with the shutters drawn down, one arm flung with abandon across her face, her dark curls clinging to her damp forehead.
And she drinks. She starts drinking at sundown on the glassed-in veranda, surrounded by her two sisters and younger brother, while the blue hills disappear in the dim light.
Holding up her empty crystal glass, Mother says, “Will you get me the other half, Pie?” Pie, the eldest of her three sisters, who is two years older than my mother and a little taller, jumps up obediently to bring Mother another drink and after that, another one.
We learn there are many “other halves,” in this whole, as many as she desires. None of her family, who are all dependent on her and my father’s money, will even try to stop her. Her two sisters do her bidding.
She is the middle one, the one they call Bill, because she was a tomboy. She is the lucky one, she says, the only one who has married a wealthy man, a hardworking timber merchant. There is a brother, too, whom they call Proie, but he does not seem to count or amount to much.
It is a world of women who obey Mother.
“I have to wee,” Mother says to my Aunt Pie, whose real name is Dorothy, but whom she calls Pie, perhaps a shortened form of Sweetie Pie.
“That’s one thing I can’t do for you,” Pie says with a thin smile.